


Where Have You Been, My Blue-Eyed Son?

by theswearingkind



Series: Dylan Series [1]
Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:29:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theswearingkind/pseuds/theswearingkind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An impromptu trip to Texas has Ennis finding out what he never wanted to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Have You Been, My Blue-Eyed Son?

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thanks to neuontz and lucyinthesky72 for their wonderful beta-ing, and to neuontz for the title.
> 
> originally posted to brokebackslash in 2006.

Although he’d shoot himself in the dick before he’d admit it out loud, Ennis saves every postcard Jack sends him. He throws away bills and papers and letters from Junior, but he hoards the thin squares of cardboard that come every few months, bearing just a few words—-hey friend, I hear the fish are jumpin, what do you say? Jack—-and usually a picture of a mountain on the front. He has never thrown one away, and he never will.

The return address on the postcard in his hand reads 312 Claremont Street, Childress, Texas, in Jack’s sprawling, childish handwriting. The numbers on the brick mailbox in front of Ennis say 312, the sign at the corner says Claremont, and the podunk town he just drove his piece-of-shit truck through claimed to be Childress. But Ennis still can’t believe where he is, or how he got here, or why in God’s name he’s sitting in his truck like a dumbass, staring at Jack’s house.

The house is long and low, reddish-brown brick on a perfectly green yard of perfectly mowed grass. It doesn’t look like the kind of place Jack would pick to live in, but it’s nice enough, a hell of a lot nicer than Ennis’s place. Still, Ennis would never in a million years have picked it out as Jack’s house—-Jack likes wild places, lots of space and air and openness, and this place is surrounded by houses just like it, long rows of identical three-bedrooms.

Ennis really isn’t sure why he’s here at all. He’d just been sitting at home, listening to the wind howl outside his window, and all of the sudden he was missing Jack so badly he couldn’t see straight. Before he’d realized what he was doing he was out the door and in his truck, headed for Texas—-headed for Texas and Jack and some sort of life he’d been waiting for since he was nineteen. Now that he’s here, though, the weight of everything he wants is sitting mighty heavily on his shoulders.

The only thought that keeps him going is that somewhere inside that house is Jack—-Jack with the blue eyes, Jack who he’s wanted since he was a teenager, Jack who knew him better after one beer than he knew his own self. Jack is inside that house, and by God Ennis did not drive fourteen hours just to sit in his own damn truck in the middle of some development.

With a great effort he climbs out of his truck and walks the miles to the front door. The door is white as the snow up on Brokeback, and even as he knocks he feels vaguely guilty for soiling it with his rancher’s hands.

It’s not twenty seconds before the door swings open. Ennis is wound up enough that he almost doesn’t realize that the person in the doorway isn’t Jack. He was so sure that Jack would open the door that it takes him a moment to adjust.

“Yes?” says the woman, mouth set in something close to a scowl as she looks him up and down.

“This the Twist place?” he mumbles, though he knows full well that it is.

“Yes. Can I help you?” she asks, despite the fact that her tone of voice makes it abundantly clear that the last thing she wants is to help Ennis with anything.

“I’m—-I’m lookin’ for Jack Twist,” he says. She looks at him oddly from underneath dark black eyebrows that don’t go with her bottle-blonde hair. Shit, he thinks, I shoulda introduced myself first.

“You the turbine man?” she asks, a hint of interest in her voice, and Ennis remembers Jack saying that all Lureen cared about was business.

“No, ma’am, I’m not. I ain’t from these parts, exactly.” He’s about to introduce himself when she cuts in, interest gone once she realized he didn’t have any money to spend.

“Jack’s not here,” she says flatly.

Ennis isn’t prepared for that. “Oh. Uh, what time d’you expect him back?”

He’s not sure, but he thinks her eyes might narrow a little when she speaks. “He’s not due back ‘til tomorrow,” she says. “He’s fishin’ with a friend of his.”

Ennis’s heart seizes up in his chest and his gut turns over in his belly, and even though his ears are suddenly roaring he’s pretty sure he just heard her say—-and dear God, she can’t have just said what he thought she said, please no, not that, anything but that.

“What’s that?” he asks, once he’s recovered the power of speech.

“I said he’s fishin’ with a friend of his, not that it’s any of your business. Who are you, anyway?”

A million thoughts Ennis could never say out loud are in his head: I’ll kill you you sonofabitch, and him whoever he is I’ll rip him apart, I’ll teach you to look to another man than me, I wish I’d gone up to Brokeback last time you asked me, are you punishing me, why now, is it as good with him as it is with me, it couldn’t be could it, what’s he have I don’t, fuck you you little queer, I don’t need him nohow, how could he let someone else touch him, someone else knows him the way you do Ennis Del Mar, what do you think of that?

“S’cuse me, sir, I asked you who you are.” The woman—-she must be Lureen—-is practically tapping her toe.

He summons all the spirit left in him and answers her question. “Name’s Ennis Del Mar,” he mumbles around a tongue that lies in his mouth like lead.

The name apparently rings a bell, because her jaw unclenches and her face assumes something like--not recognition, but an understanding. “I know you,” she says slowly. “You’re the Wyoming man.”

“Yeah.”

“You and Jack go fishin’ together.”

He nods, close-lipped.

Her mouth draws up into a thin line. “Well. After, what, fifteen years of him goin’ and comin’ it sure is nice to finally get to meet you.”

Ennis is a terrible liar, always has been, and he can’t say anything back.

She looks him hard in the face for a moment, then says, “Why don’t you come in, Mr. Del Mar.” It is not a question.

“Naw, ma’am, I better be gettin’ back—”

“Mr. Del Mar, you drove an awful ways to get here and I am not lettin’ you go ‘til we have a chance to get to know each other a little better. So you just hold your horses for a minute and come on inside.” She stands aside and motions him in; helpless, he follows her into a house so clean that he feels like an asshole for even getting within ten feet of anything.

She pours him a cup of coffee, too hot but still drinkable, and sits down in a large blue easy chair opposite the pristine white couch she ushered him onto. “Now,” she says tightly, “isn’t this nice.” Ennis makes a non-committal grunt of a reply. “I’m Jack’s wife Lureen. I’m sure you guessed but I thought I might as well tell you.”

He nods. “Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “So why don’t you tell what you’re doin’ down here, Mr. Del Mar.”

It takes him a minute to work up a reply. “I was just passin’ through,” he mutters. “Thought I’d stop in, say hello.”

“Really. Now that is odd. Jack always said you didn’t have no business down here, and that’s why you two always met up in Wyoming. Shows what I know.” She turns her bottomless brown eyes on him unexpectedly and Ennis feels naked, stripped bare and laid out for the whole world to see, and he has a sudden suspicion that this woman in front of him knows everything that they’d tried so hard to hide.

“But then Jack doesn’t talk too much about you at all. In fact he never brings you up, unless’n he’s on his way up there for a trip. He ever bring me up while y’all are out there?”

And this is dangerous territory they’re heading into, but Ennis isn’t skilled enough at speech to avoid it without tripping off all kinds of alarms. He struggles for a few moments to find a way around actually having to answer, but in the end he gives up. “Ev’ry once in a while,” he admits. “Nothin’ much of consequence.”

“No,” Lureen agrees, not smiling, “it wouldn’t be. Nothin’ much that has to do with me is of consequence to Jack.”

“Now, I don’t know ‘bout that—”

She cuts him off before he can start stammering out some half-assed excuse. They both know the truth. “Well, like I said, he don’t bring you up real often. Now that rancher friend of his, him Jack talks about. Hell, Jack’ll talk about him ‘til he’s blue in the face. I’ve never seen two men get on the way those two do. If he ain’t out there fishin’, he’s talkin’ about it.”

Ennis hunches his shoulders against her words like they’re a cold Wyoming wind cutting into his skin. His grip on the coffee cup tightens until he’s certain the damn thing is going to break into shards, razor-sharp jagged edges that could cut him all to pieces, and after what she just said, he’s pretty sure he knows how it would feel. He stares into the near-black dregs of coffee left in the chipped brown cup, and tries his damnedest to block out everything. In his mind, he’s back on Brokeback, nineteen and free as a hawk flying over the mountains, half-drunk on lust and Jack and something he hadn’t yet figured out was love, riding Cigar back into camp at dusk, knowing that inside the tent Jack was waiting for him. In his mind he’s twenty-three and feeling that turning in his gut that only happened when Jack Twist was around, and God it’d been too damn long, and it didn’t even matter that anybody could walk right up and see them because it was Jack and it was him and it was right.

In his mind, there isn’t any rancher friend, and he isn’t going half-insane trying to keep from imagining Jack and this other man, this nameless, faceless creature, all tangled up in each other, Jack flushed and sweating and panting out a name that isn’t Ennis, isn’t Ennis, God yes, Ennis, please don’t stop, don’t you never never stop.

Ennis wants to ask her what his name is, but he can’t move. He wants to ask her what the point of all this is, why in God’s name she would do this, but he can’t, just like he couldn’t tell Jack what he wanted, just like he couldn’t say what would have kept Jack with him.

“That so,” he says finally.

“Yep. I reckon if one of ‘em was a woman they’d get married.” And really, the way she says it is so funny that Ennis hardly even thinks it’s odd when he starts to laugh, and, just as quickly, to cry, quiet, broken sobs that rack his body and tears that burn salty paths down his weather-beaten face. He cries for not taking the chance when he had it, for the rancher who probably doesn’t realize just what he’s started yet, for the life he might have had in a different time, but most of all, he cries for the man he came here for, for Jack, and the pain of seeing the only home he’s ever known drifting away like campfire smoke across a cloudless blue sky.

Lureen doesn’t say anything, just sits silently while he cries on her couch, head tucked into his chest to try and hide the tears. She drains what’s left of her coffee, shuddering slightly at the now-cold liquid. “You know what though,” she says finally. “He never seems as happy with Randall as he does when he’s headin’ out for one of y’all’s trips. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they get on real good, but it ain’t nothin’ like how he gets for you.”

Part of him knows that that was supposed to help, but all he really hears is Randall. They get on real good. 


End file.
